Mirrored Pool Question

[Viceroy]

Hi Everyone,

I finally put together my FreeNAS server with the assistance of this awesome community. My question is regarding setting up and adding drives to a mirrored pool.

Currently I have 4x 4TB Seagate drives sitting in a separate raidbox with my data on it. About 3.5TB used.

I plan on buying two additional 4TB drives. I am wondering if the below is possible.

1. On FreeNAS, create a new pool with the 2 new drives (pool1).
2. Copy all my data from the raidbox to pool1.
3. Take out all 4 drives from my raidbox.
4. Add 1 of the drives to pool1.
5. Create pool2 with the remaining 3 drives and have it mirror pool1.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

 

[Jailer]

You were good until step 4. If you add a single drive to an existing vdev/pool you just introduced a single point of failure. If that drive fails it will take out your entire pool.

If you want to go with mirrored pairs for your pool layout then the proper way to expand your pool would be to add a vdev of 2 drives mirrored.

Personally I'd go pick up an external drive and move all your data over to it and build a RAIDZ2 pool with the 6 4TB drives and then copy the data from the external drive to your new pool. But that's just my opinion.

 

[SweetAndLow]

I would do the same thing.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[nojohnny101]

Me too. @Viceroy is there a reason you want to go with mirrors? Seems with 6 drives, as the others have said, raidz2 is your better option. it has a good balance of performance and redundancy.

 

[Viceroy]

Thanks guys. I have all my data backed up to an external now.

Initially I was looking at doing mirrored pools because I read somewhere that you get better performance and faster rebuild times with less space and less redundancy as the tradeoff.

This FreeNAS server will mainly be hosting my PLEX data, iso files for a PXE server, and smaller things that don't really need to be mentioned.

But looking more into it after your raidz2 recommendations, it looks like a better option for what I'm doing which is nothing intensive. I'll gain more disk space and have more redundancy this way. Thanks again for the info.